the Novelist
by Greenstuff
Summary: Very very late response to Severus Snape - The Romance Novelist Challenge
1. the Story

Severus threw down his quill in frustration. Trust mother to come up with such a ridiculous situation as this one. The very idea was ludicrous. Severus Snape, the evilest professor at Hogwarts in fifty years, romance novelist extraordinaire. Of course mother always had been one to come up with the absurd. Her latest scheme was nothing compared to the scheme from three moths earlier that had been concocted to, as she had so elegantly put it, "alleviate the ennui which had overtaken him like Communism through Eastern Europe." That particular disaster had ended with him partaking in a rather unsavory bachelor's auction. The after effect of that calamity had only recently been brought under control and here she was with yet another 'dying wish'.  
  
Clarice Snape was notorious amongst her socialite friends and family as being a hypochondriac of the worst sort. A terrific actress in her day she had the capabilities to fake any illness at the drop of a hat and had no qualms about doing so whenever the mood struck. And usually the mood struck when she created a scheme that she wanted to visit on her only son. Severus could remember each of the schemes vividly. Thanks to his mother's whims he was now an excellent chef, a better than decent salsa dancer and was about to become a paperback novelist. There had been other schemes that hadn't forced him to take on a new skill - or identity – and he remembered these fondly. Before the end of the War most of his mothers requests had been self serving ones that had no respect for his own wishes or anyone else's, oh how he missed those now. Unfortunately, since the war had ended Clarice had taken on a Mother Theresa (some Muggle saint) complex, and had decided to use her Slytherin cunning to "benefit" her only child. If she were looking for gratitude she would have to live a very long time.  
  
A knocking at the door galvanized the sulking man into action. The papers he had been scribbling on were shoved rather unceremoniously into a desk drawer and replaced by a stack of already graded papers. In one fluid motion the potions master tried to stand, caught his foot on a partially opened drawer and sailed across the room, finally landing in a heap on his hearth rug. At this point the person at the door got sick of waiting for it to be answered and waltzed in, regarding the fallen man's position with a superior smirk.  
  
"Professor?" The irritating voice that could only belong to the newest DADA professor at Hogwarts brought a groan from Severus and inspired him to hit his head on the floor repeatedly until a hand reached down and, with surprising strength, hauled him to his feet. Should have known she wouldn't come alone, he thought bitterly glowering at the professor and her scruffy-haired friend.  
  
"What?!?" he snapped irritably, dusting off the front of his robes and trying to appear nonchalant.  
  
That his uninvited guest was trying valiantly to hide her mirth was not lost on the Potions Master, but it did very little to soothe his nerves. "You missed the staff meeting." She said shortly, her twinkling eyes eerily reminiscent of the overly jolly Headmaster.  
  
Severus raised an eyebrow. He always missed the staff meetings - damn tedious affairs that they were - and no one ever dared to call him on it, until now. It seemed that the new professor was intent on disrupting the usual life of the Hogwarts staff as much as humanly possible during her tenure as DADA professor. He recalled with a mixture of amusement and irritation the time she had tried to talk Dumbledore into making Muggle Studies a required course for all First year students. The attempt had failed miserably but she had no been daunted, instead she had begun slipping bits of Muggle Studies into her DADA curriculum. Dumbledore, meddlesome bastard that he usually was, refused to interfere, his excuse being that the children were still learning defense against the dark arts, and that he thought it admirable, if a little misguided, that their newest professor wanted to make a difference in the inborn prejudices of the wizarding community.  
  
"Um... Professor?"  
  
Severus was snapped out of his thoughts, "yes?" he asked innocently, prepared to utterly deny the obvious fact that he had been letting his mind wander. He was not one of her dunderhead pupils and he would not be treated as such, ever.  
  
Her gaze suspicious, the young woman circled him. Severus was struck with the alarming sensation that she was sizing him up for her next meal. "You missed that meeting on purpose didn't you?" She asked, her tone accusing.  
  
Severus suppressed – barely – the urge to roll his eyes. "Are you simply here to accuse me Professor?" he said professor as if applying the title to the female currently stalking him caused him excruciating pain, "or did you have an actual reason? Because I have work to do." Severus desperately hope she would simply back off instead of being her normal investigative self, one glance at the papers on his desk and she would see right through his lie.  
  
Unfortunately Severus' rapid desperate wish did not come true. The woman twitched an eyebrow in the general direction of her oafish friend and sat presumptuously on the corner of his desk. "Looks to me like you've finished your work for the evening," she said, picking up a fourth year essay and scanning it with her eyes. "You missed an error." She said, reaching for his quill and dipping it in the overly large bottle of red ink that Albus had given him last Christmas as a sort of ill-planned joke. She made a few marks on the paper before dropping it on the pile.  
  
Severus was angry enough to have forcibly removed her from his office had Albus not made him promise to at least pretend to tolerate her. The oaf at the door was also a deterrent, if a minor one. He wondered if the woman knew of his deal with Albus, and would not have been surprised if she did. The headmaster never tired in meddling in Severus' business, sometimes making Severus wonder if Dumbledore and his mother were working together to make his life hell.  
  
Apparently bored with his stoic silence the woman actually began riffling through his desk drawers. Severus no5ticed in time and was prepared to launch into a bitter diatribe about the ceaseless stupidity of the Gryffindor female when there was a knock at the door. "What!?" Severus barked, flinging open the door to reveal the crimson haired wife of the boy- who-lived-and-was-currently-playing-bodyguard with tear stains running down her face, looking truly distressed. "Potter," he said sharply – his first acknowledgement of the boy since that woman had invaded his space. "Go look after your wife." He tried to avoid using the names of that particular group as much to allow himself to deny their existence, as to stage a minute rebellion against the headmaster's choice to hire them and his demands that the staff respect them.  
  
"May I convey how much I ardently admire and love you?" Gwyneth asked, flinging herself passionately towards Harold, her bosom heaving..." Hermione read the words dramatically, rising from her place on his desk and taking a step towards him, her eyes flickering in amusement. "Really Professor, reading this trash, I thought better of you." Hermione said smirking at the stunned mullet look her former professor was shooting her way.  
  
Severus, who had suffered a minor coronary thinking that she might have found the manuscript, breathed a sigh of relief to see that the book she was holding was the one the publisher had recently sent back for his perusal. The garish cover proclaimed in loud letters that this book was the second in the best selling series "Flawless Passions". The first book "Effervescent" had sold over a million copies worldwide, and the true author of the series had suffered a heart attack and would be unable to write another for at least a year, so Severus had been enlisted to replace him, at least for the time being. His own book was to be entitled "Breathless" and Severus was finding it very difficult to write with the same panache the series' former author had used to convey his sickening plot. It didn't help his cause that he had never been in any sort of relationship, let alone in love, so he was writing off the cuff with no real experience. "If you must know," he finally replied to Hermione's gentle taunting, "I confiscated it from a student. And am waiting until I am certain it won't cause an explosion before I light it on fire and spend an enjoyable half hour watching it burn." He plucked it effortlessly from her fingers and, grimacing at the cover, tossed it back into the drawer where it had been lying before.  
  
"You're off your chump!" Hermione said, giving him a faint smile and shaking her head in mild amusement.  
  
"Overreaction doesn't suit professor," He said lightly, finding it hard to regain his irritation of earlier as relief bombarded him from all sides. She didn't know! "Now tell me," he said, leaning back in his desk chair and gazing contemptuously at her, "why are you here?"  
  
Hermione resumed her place on the edge of his desk, far too close for Severus' comfort., and placed a small stack of paper in front on him. "The staff meeting this afternoon, which you were kind enough to avoid, was called to decide on the parts for the end-of-term play."  
  
Oh yes, Severus thought grouchily, one of Albus' more annoying ideas, the staff was to perform a play for any students who stayed through the Christmas holidays. Severus would have thought Albus would settle for simply having another ball if he were truly so desperate for the students to stay over the holiday, but Albus never did do anything the sensible way. He motioned for Hermione to continue.  
  
"I came to deliver your script." She smirked at him in a maddening fashion. "Enjoy!" She rose quickly and hurried to get out of the room but his hand falling firmly on her wrist stopped her movement.  
  
"Wait." He said sharply. "Why are we doing this play? Your paper and your parts are pure crap! Everyone knows that. Longbottom's play was better!" He narrowed his eyes at her, trying to convey the sternness that could reduce a sixth year to a sniveling mess. Unfortunately it had been some time since Hermione Granger was a sixth year and the gaze had no effect.  
  
Hermione raised an eyebrow. "Did you read Neville's script?" she asked incredulously. "It was about toads." She turned a glare of her own in his direction, a surprisingly effective glare, Severus was cowed. "You don't have to like me Professor, but at least give me some respect. I may not be as great a writer as say, Henry Litovsk, but there was nothing wrong with that script!"  
  
Severus winced at the mention of Litovsk – the infamous author of "Flawless Passions"- and actually felt for a moment that he had judged her script too harshly, but then he remembered who had written it and a self satisfied smirk flickered on his lips. He enjoyed getting her riled up like this. "Henry Litovsk is hardly a great writer Miss Granger," He said with a half smile, "which you would know if you had ever read anything else."  
  
"So you did read it!" she crowed triumphantly, completely catching Severus off-guard. "I found book one on your book shelves when Albus sent me to retrieve something last week, and I couldn't resist borrowing it." She smirked at him, knowing how he valued his privacy and that if she were to shut up now she would never get a chance to begin teasing him on the subject again. "What do you think? Will Angelica and Harold find love? Or is there going to be yet another new love interest?" Hermione honestly couldn't care two straws about trashy romance novels, but this one had been written with such flair that she couldn't resist reading it and even pre-ordering the next installment. She found it hysterical that Severus had most likely experienced a similar reaction to the books.  
  
Severus would have at that moment loved to push her out of his room and insist she never come within fifty meters of him again, but knew that the issue must be resolved first, or she would simply spread the news that he, the toughest professor the school would ever see, enjoyed stupid fluffy romance novels. "That is quite enough professor." he said, his tone final. "Not that I care, but Harold with end up with Gwyneth and Angelica dies of cancer. Now will you please leave so I may return to my work?" he asked. It took several minutes before Severus realized exactly why Hermione was gaping at him like a fish out of water. Stupid stupid stupid! He barely resisted the urge to bash his head on the desk in front of him.  
  
Hermione recovered a modicum of composure and looked at him with calculating eyes. "You wrote them didn't you?" she asked, her tone curious rather than accusing.  
  
Severus summoned all the Slytherin cunning he had left in him, discovered that it had fled the scene – lacking the Gryffindor courage to stand tall in the face of adversity- and said "not all of them, only book three." Before giving in to his instincts and pounding his head against the table top.  
  
If he had expected Hermione to run from the room and proclaim this new news from the hill-tops Severus was to be greatly disappointed. Instead of reveling in the embarrassing information Hermione took on a thoughtful expression, reached out with a gentle hand and stopped Severus' self- mutilation, and asked "Can I see it?"  
  
Severus turned his head – still resting on the desktop - sideways and looked up at her. "Why not," He said, defeated, "it's in that drawer." He indicated the right one with his eyes before Turing so he was once again face down on the desktop.  
  
Hermione silently flipped through the pages he had already written making small noted in the margins with a pencil she always kept in her robe pocket. The story was actually very good, it had an intensity that Litovsk had been missing, even if there seemed to be no connection between the characters and the somber man who had created them. When she finished the placed the manuscript back in it's drawer and rose to her feet. "It's going to be a terrific book." She said softly to Severus' back, he had not in the entire time she had been reading. "I will of course be discreet, but I will be damned if I don't find a way to celebrate with you - or for you if you don't feel up to the challenge – when you finish this thing." She smirked. "And I'll warn you now, if I have to wait until this thing is published to know what happens with Gwyneth there will be hell to pay."  
  
Severus raised his head and turned. If he weren't mistaken the enmity between them had just been swept away completely without his knowledge. She knew his secret, his weakness, and was not only was she not going to exploit him, but she was offering him friendship and encouragement. He had done many stupid and nasty things in his life, but he wasn't about to do one now. He smiled tentatively at her. "I'll be up to the challenge." He said.  
  
Hermione smiled at him and, with a conspiratorial wink, headed for the door.  
  
"I'm sorry I've been so rotten to you." He said, wincing at how much he sounded like Potter or the Weasley brat.  
  
"That's alright, Abscess makes the heart grow fonder." She quipped, smiling at her own pun.  
  
"And for that you should be shot." He said dryly, "goodnight."  
  
"Goodnight" Hermione replied with a soft smile.  
  
Severus watched her retreating figure until it disappeared from sight.  
  
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A/N: I think I had a little too much fun writing this story. Both my characters are OOC and I may just have to write a sequel... *grins evilly* anyhow. I hope you found it as enjoyable to read as I did to write... :D please review 


	2. the Rules

Severus Snape - The Romance Novelist Challenge  
  
1) SS is a secret writer of Mills and Boon type novels.  
  
2) No-one knows this...for a while.  
  
3) Hermione finds out.  
  
4) HG can still be at Hogwarts as a student, or as a graduate.  
  
5) There must be a reference to one of SS's novels. Title is up to the writer....  
  
6) The following phrases must be incorporated:  
  
"- alleviate the ennui which had overtaken him/her like Communism through Eastern Europe."  
  
"May I convey how much I ardently admire and love you?"  
  
"Your paper and your parts are pure crap."  
  
"Abscess makes the heart grow fonder."  
  
"You're off your chump!"  
  
And some reference somewhere to a "heaving bosom".  
  
Characters may be OOC if required. Silliness is not a prerequisite, but it helps.... 


End file.
